The eleven stories in Mouth are unsettling and visceral tales of monsters, women, and women in love with monsters. That’s a little simplistic: these stories introduce the reader to worlds locked down by disaster, ripped through with portals and holes, haunted by those we love and those we may yet come to love. In one story, a mortician autopsies her former lover, laying out a medical examiner’s report of their relationship. In another, a woman is finally getting back on the apps after the conclusion of the time war, with mixed results. In a third, a compulsive liar investigates the mystery of the missing girl whose ghost haunts her dorm room. The eleven women who narrate these stories are reckless, ruthless, and endlessly curious. Most of all, they’re ravenous.
Mouth is Puloma Ghosh’s debut, a collection of, in her words, stories inspired by “terrible, visceral nightmares” and “weird crushes.” The duality is characteristic. As she says, “Both eating and loving are ways to merge with an object of admiration and hold it inside you.” As such, many of the stories are matryoshkas; each of their nesting dolls open up to reveal love or death or love again.
Of course, many of the stories center mouths in their many forms and functions. Mouths that eat, lick, chew, suck, or destroy; mouths to vanish into. “She put her mouth on each wound,” the collection’s first narrator says, ecstatic, while the second tries to speak, “but from her mouth comes a sound like a thousand insects, a summer downpour, the shaking leaves of a dying tree …” In this collection, the mouth is a portal or a cave, a dark space that can be destructive or sexual or both. Mostly both.
This collection is darkly sexy. Its narrators want to fuck and devour, or be devoured. In an interview with One Story, the author notes:
Eating and sex are two of our most animal pleasures. And both … have elements of power baked in, between predator and prey, between two people involved in a bodily act, where it’s impossible to be completely equal. They share so many of the same gestures …
This comes through in the deeply queer, decadent, and observant sexuality of the stories in the collection. Sex is never uncomplicated. “Pleasure is another form of taking,” the first narrator says, while another maintains, “Sometimes sex isn’t sexy, just effective.” A third describes it as “something that snapped you wide awake to the world.” The collection’s narrators long for sex with lovers who fascinate or frighten, lovers dubiously human or dubiously alive. Sex isn’t solely about pleasure; instead, it’s often about sorrow, or infatuation, or, commonly, grief.
Throughout the collection, narrators mourn the loss of family or lovers—some consciously, many without knowing it. One narrator believes her father has invented the story of her dead mother, while another dissects both her relationship and the body of her lover. “First love was always life-or-death like that, at least until things became literally life-or-death,” one narrator remembers of her first relationship, while trying to avoid thoughts of her dead ex.
Most of Ghosh’s narrators have a point of grief which separates them from the world, leaving them observers, or strangers, even as children. One character says she “performs a facsimile of living,” while another describes looking into a mirror, meeting her own eyes, and asking, “What am I doing here, and then, what am I?” This question haunts many of Mouth’s women. These stories are body horror, asking: what can a body be? “Was I the creature or was he?” one narrator wonders. At which point do you choose monstrosity? When do you no longer want to be human? What if you were never human in the first place?
The body, through sex or death, is rendered deeply malleable. Most narrators end their stories in a different form than the one in which they begin. The writing in these stories is matter-of-fact and detailed: some forms have thick pelts or removable skin or bark or excellent makeup or a layer of fat around the heart. We know the shape of narrators’ fingers, or the texture of their skin, or, of course, the shape of their mouths—though many of these characteristics change over the course of each story.
These stories ask what it means to be vulnerable to transformation, to choose it or have it chosen for us. Visceral feelings open the narrators up to visceral changes. It is the grief, or the love, or both, that pull the narrators into bodily metamorphosis, from woman to flora or fauna, from living body to ruined corpse, from the familiar self to something unrecognizable. “We’re all beasts underneath,” says a character in “Supergiant,” and the stories in the collection bear this out. “Just as I had made him more human in our cohabitation, he had made me more animal,” one narrator says as she begins to change. Another agrees to “be dismantled and recomposed,” while a third “crawled inside that warm, wet womb and remained, unborn in the body she loved so much.”
These malleable bodies complement the malleable worlds each story inhabits. The book is shot through with portals and rifts in the world. A literal portal in “Anomaly” pairs well with the “the openings in the world” described in “Lemon Boy,” “the flimsy places that people could fall into and never really return.” These worlds are in flux as much as are the bodies that inhabit them; they are as easily torn or destroyed. Reality is only a thin film layered over what’s beyond.
Ghosh’s stories want you to dwell in those “flimsy places,” to consider your own vulnerability. Under what circumstances would you agree to be “dismantled and recomposed”? Given a choice, would you stay static or choose to reconstruct yourself into something different? What sort of grief, or love, might monster you? These eleven stories encourage the reader to, as one character says, “rip the veil down entirely, be vulnerable forever.”